Web users use Internet browsers to visit different web sites of their choice to access, view and share content, communicate and collaborate with one another, conduct Internet searches, and buy products online. The popularity of web portals is driven by the ability to integrate multiple sources of information and content into a unified user experience. Rich content and capabilities continue to evolve on the web, and portal operators, who continuously struggle to integrate these latest technologies into portals, are constantly faced with the compromise of linking the user out of the portal to lower cost and increase speed to market.
When a user's experience is comprised of multiple disparate applications, complexities arise when dealing with session management. For example, in some web sessions, the user is prone to receiving a session timeout error screen when clicking between applications. Additionally, as discussed below, these different applications cannot easily share information to enhance the user experience.
In many web portals, the user enters the main portal application before accessing the other services available on the portal. Also, to interact with certain applications, the user would typically need to leave the main portal. Unfortunately, this results in session management concerns. For example, in an ideal implementation the user can access all content, services, and functionality through portlets and would not need to access any other web application. Portal operators, however, cannot always achieve this ideal implementation because applications do not typically offer standardized portlets that can be integrated into the main portal. Instead, each application is only exposed as a standalone application. In this typical case, the portal will provide an introductory portlet that describes the application and will offer a hyperlink to the full application server.
One of many issues implicated in this scenario is session management timeout for each of these applications. Although several products exist to enable single sign-on entry to give access to multiple applications, such products do not address enterprise session management that can keep all application sessions in the set synchronized. For example, after a user enters a portal and clicks on a link that takes the user to an application, the portal server is unaware of the user's activity on that other application. For this reason, a user's session may expire while using the application, thereby resulting in session expiration before the user links back to the main portal. Although portal operators resort to setting the portal session timeout to a very high number and, in the event of timeout, resort to rebuilding the session, these are not ideal solutions.
A corollary issue relates to loss of a common session. In a typical application, different components can share information about the products and services with which the user is interacting. This allows, for instance, an MP3 commerce component to automatically offer the soundtrack for a movie that the user is previewing in another component. In the absence of a common session, however, the necessary information is not shared and is lost upon session timeout.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.